I previously wrote about what cross-grinding is and why it’s not always bad. Here is a photo of one of my skates showing the distinctive marks left by cross-grinding.
Cross-grinding leaves many small lines perpendicular to the length of the blade.
If the cross-grinding wheel is too coarse (like the one I used with my Ferodowill skate holder), these can keep the blades from gliding nicely or worse, catch the ice and cause a fall. I discovered this when I took my Ferodowill-sharpened Jones skates out on the ice. As long as you smooth them out (e.g., by stoning the blade), they’re nothing to worry about.
On January 23, 1917, Joseph Henry Ferodowill of St. Paul, MN, was granted a patent for his skate holder. It’s basically two C clamps on a metal base, with some screws that make it adjustable.
The advertisement says it’s good for “Lengthwise and Cross” grinding. The picture in the advertisement above looks like the wheel is set up for cross grinding.
I got one of these skate holders and used it to sharpen my Robert Jones skates. Once I’ve skated on them, I’ll post the results. I also sharpened a new pair of blades I’ve been working on. Here is a video of how I did it:
Sharpening skates with a Ferodowill skate holder
First, I used witness marks and adjusted the holder to align the blade.
Second, I used long, steady strokes to sharpen the blade.
This bench grinder has a 6″ wheel, which means I put a 3″ radius of hollow on the blades. Do not use this hollow for regular skating, it will not be satisfactory. But I’m interested in seeing whether it performs better than the totally-flat sharpening Robert Jones recommends.
This little handheld sharpening device was patented in 1920 by George H. Berghman of Chicago, IL. You squeeze the handles together at the top to open it. When you release the pressure, it clamps onto the sides of the blade. Then you slide it back and forth and the grinding stone inside does its work. The stone’s diameter is one inch, which means it puts a 1/2″ radius of hollow on your blades.
Side view showing the grinding stone.
There are loads of these available on eBay and other internet sites for pretty low prices (though not as low as the original—$2.50 according to the price tag on mine, but only $1.25 according to advertisements in Boys’ Life. I guess girls are not supposed to use it.
Boys’ Life vol. 10, no. 12 (December, 1920), p. 67.
The device seems a bit unwieldy. When I squeeze mine, it feels pretty wobbly—You have to be careful to keep the blade opening even along its entire length. And in mine, the stone is stuck to one side. I think this is a defect in my particular one rather than part of the design because the back of the box says to rotate the stone frequently by “turning the stone with thumb and forefinger.” Mine won’t budge.
The stuckness of my stone means that only one side of the holder opens with respect to it, so the stone will never be centered on the blade. This would cause uneven edges and really mess up my skating if I relied on it! But if it weren’t stuck, I suspect alignment would be rather difficult because there would be one more moving part.
To conclude, here’s an advertisement directed at hardware stores that promises the sharpeners “do a good sharpening job… and give you a good profit.”
It also features a sharpening machine: a bench grinder with an 8″ wheel and a skate-holding jig. The 8″ wheel implies a 4″ radius of hollow since it is set up to cross-grind.
Back in the days when all serious skaters did both figures and freestyle, everyone had two pairs of skates, one for figures (called “patch skates”) and one for freestyle. But having two pairs wasn’t a requirement to begin skating. Everyone started out with only one pair. A second pair wasn’t considered necessary until second test or thereabouts. Today, experienced freestylists getting started with figures may find them very difficult. For one thing, they leave too many flats to pass any test. Why did it work back then? I think a big part of the answer is the way skates were sharpened. Back then, skaters with only one pair of skates used combination grind, which seems to have been forgotten.
Flats occur when both edges of the blade touch the ice. When you get the light to hit the ice at the correct angle, the tracings left look like two lines separated by the width of the blade. This happens even if you are skating on a curve! In contrast, when you’re on an edge, your blade leaves only a single line. Whether your skate leaves a single line or a double line depends on how far to the side you lean as you glide: you have to lean far enough to get the other edge off the ice. How far you have to lean is determined by the centripetal force as you go along a curve, which is a function of your velocity. Having a flatter hollow on your blade means you don’t have to lean as far to get your other edge off the ice, enabling you to go slower on a single edge. Sid Broadbent has a good discussion of this in Skateology.
Today’s freestyle skates are typically sharpened to a fairly deep radius of hollow. 1/2″ is quite common, and some skaters go as deep as 3/8″. For figures, you want a much flatter hollow. 1″ is the usual starting point; they went up from there. A shallow hollow digs into the ice less, helping you avoid flats and glide for longer from a single push. It also makes turns easier. But it means you have to skate correctly: if you’re not right on the edge, a patch sharpening will skid when a freestyle hollow would feel secure.
With such a big discrepancy, it’s no wonder freestyle skates don’t work well for figures. I think people have forgotten about combination grind. Skaters who did figures and freestyle with a single pair of skates typically used an in-between hollow, something like 3/4″ or 5/8″. This worked adequately for the lower levels of both disciplines. But once they became more skilled, these skaters needed a deeper hollow for control in freestyle and a shallower hollow for good figures. Hence the two pairs of skates.
The outcome is: If you are trying to do figures and find that you have way too many flats, try asking for a flatter hollow next time you get your skates sharpened. It should help you get rid of flats, but will feel very strange and possibly mess up your non-figure skating.
The two other main differences between patch and freestyle skates are:
Soft boots allow the ankle mobility necessary for fine edge control. Back when everyone did figures, boots were much less stiff. Skaters didn’t need super-stiff boots because they weren’t doing all the big jumps seen in competition today. Even beginner boots are awfully stiff for figures today.
Skaters often shaved off the bottom of the toe pick on their patch skates to avoid extraneous marks on turns. Blades designed for figures came with this modification out of the box. At the lowest levels, this isn’t necessary.
IJlst, stad van schaatsenmakers by Edsko Hekman. IJlst: Visser, 2002.
Today’s book report is on IJlst, stad van schaatsenmakers by Edsko Hekman. IJlst is a a city in Friesland where lots of skates were made in the nineteenth century. This short book (only 64 pages long) is about the 24 IJlst skate-makers. Several of these made skate-making a multi-generational family affair, passing their knowledge on to their children and grandchildren. The skates they made were the traditional type: long low metal blades with wooden footbeds.
The first was a blacksmith called Jacob Thomas Faber born in 1804. His family’s blacksmithing business is dates back to at least 1749. His sons Thomas Jacob and Cornelius Jacob continued the business into the twentieth century.
Other skate-making dynasties included the Nauta, Douma, and Planting families. The latter continued producing skates until 1980. But the biggest businesses were the Nooitgedagt and Frisia skate factories, founded by Jan Jarigs Nooitgedagt in 1865 and Klaas Eeltje de Vries (a former Nooitgedagt employee) and his son Willem in 1922, respectively. Neither was devoted solely to skate-making; other activities were necessary to pay the bills. Frisia lasted the longest, into the 1990s, but Hekman spends more time on Nooitgedagt.
The book concludes with a “nostalgic walking tour of IJlst skate-makers”: a map and directions for visiting 14 sites of skate-making activity.
Cross-grinding refers to sharpening skates with a grinding stone whose axis of rotation is parallel to the skate blade. This means that if you hold the skate sideways (blade parallel to the floor), the grinding wheel rotates down. This is how the ordinary bench grinders from the hardware store are set up.
A bench grinder. It’s better not to sharpen your skates on one of these. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In contrast, most skate sharpening machines have the grinding wheel oriented parallel to the blade. Its axis of rotation is up and down, 90 degrees from the axis on this bench grinder.
The usual skate sharpening machine setup. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Such machines generally have a cross-grinding wheel as well as the main sharpening wheel. The people who do the sharpening may use the cross-grinding wheel to remove excessive rust or try to even the edges on new or poorly sharpened blades.
Sid Broadbent, who makes skate sharpening machines, has this to say about cross grinding:
We realize in the case of tabletop machines, their cross grinding capability is certainly advantageous for badly damaged hockey skates, but much of the time it is used whether needed or not. Excessive material is removed, a perfectly accurate groove is destroyed which then has to be reestablished. This excessive metal removal does not affect the overall geometry of a hockey blade since it is removed uniformly over the entire length of the skating surface—or should be. When this approach is used on figure skates, their effective life is reduced to about six sharpenings! An enormous and unnecessary waste of an expensive skate.
Broadbent, Skateology, VII:7
It seems to me that the problem here is more misuse of cross-grinding than use of it at all. I think what Broadbent is hinting at is that some skate sharpeners have this as their standard procedure:
Cross-grind to make the blades “flat.”
Put the right hollow on with the parallel stone.
I put “flat” in quotes in #1 because I want to bring up a point about cross-grinding that seems to have been forgotten: When you cross-grind a skate blade, the hollow does not become flat. It takes the radius of the grinding wheel. So, on the bench grinder pictured above, you may end up with a 3–4″ radius of hollow. Of course, this will change as the wheel wears down. But if you want, say, a 1/2″ hollow, and you happen to have a grinding wheel with a 1/2″ radius, you can get what you want by cross-grinding. Plus, you’ll be able to sharpen all the way up to the toe pick! A parallel sharpener can’t reach a small area just behind the toe pick because the diameter of the wheel is too large.
If you follow the procedure above, you’ll end up with uneven edges unless you’re careful to hold the blade perpendicular to the radius of the cross-grinding wheel. It’s tempting for sharpeners to think of the result of cross-grinding as “flat” and go from there when they put the final hollow on. But because the hollow is not actually flat, a new hollow that looks centered will actually be slightly off-center. That’s because sharpeners use witness marks to align the blade in the holder for sharpening described by Broadbent (VII:1–VII:5). These are marks made on the groove of the blade by lightly touching it to the grinding wheel. When they’re centered, you have the blade aligned…as long as the original groove was centered! If it wasn’t, you need to make a correction.
Determination of the amount of height correction to remedy a specific out-of-squareness error is a matter of experience and experimentation. In any case the effect of any correction would be assessed at intervals throughout the sharpening process by removing the carriage and checking edge squareness with the precision square … then making any further necessary height adjustments.
Broadbent, Skateology, VII:4
That makes sharpening much more complex. And you don’t realize that the the blade is out of square (or the edges are uneven) because you think the cross-grinder made them flat, they’ll never become even. For a figure skater, having uneven edges feels like one side is too sharp and the other side is too dull.
Don’t cross-grind unless you’re careful about not taking off too much blade and making sure the edges are even. But when done properly, cross-grinding can actually work out well.
In A Treatise on Skating—the first book on skating, published exactly 250 years ago—Robert Jones describes, in great detail, his ideal skates. I made a pair and tried them out.
Jones’s skates are the type used in England at his time, in contrast to the Dutch type. They have short, curved blades to allow skaters to do edges.
[S]kating is used here [in England] as an exercise and diversion only; hence an easy movement and graceful attitude are the sole objects of our attention. To arrive at these, nothing can be better imagined than the present form of our skates.
Jones 2017 [1772], 34.
He provides a drawing of the skates, which is what I worked from:
Jones 2017 [1772], 36.
I made the wood part from popular using a variety of power tools in the woodshop at CIADC. The holes for the straps were the most difficult part and I ended up carving out sections of the top with the table saw, sawing the holes in, then placing inlays on the top to fill the carved-out sections. It would have been better to make the skates in two parts, top and bottom, then glue them together.
I had the blades laser-cut from 1/4″ mild steel by Send Cut Send. They were very quick! What I wasn’t able to capture was the taper. Jones specifies that the blades should be 1/4″ wide at the heel, increasing in size to 5/16″ at around the point labeled B, then increasing more sharply to 5/8″ in the front. Mine are just 1/4″ wide all the way. That may or may not make a difference for skating.
I used an angle grinder to polish the blades and sharpened them by draw-filing with a hand file, following Jones’ advice not to give them a hollow. He considered fluted skates too bad to even describe!
Putting the wood and metal parts together was quite simple once I had the wood carved to fit. The blade slid into its groove and stayed there—the little hook at the front was enough to hold wood and metal together.
Attaching the blades to the boots was the next step. The boots are just a pair of old Riedells I had sitting around unused. For straps, I used fake leather. The three “little sharp points of iron” Jones represents by I, I, and I (35) were little nails glued into the wood. The heel screw was more of a challenge, and mine doesn’t quite match his. I just drilled a hole through metal, wood, and leather boot and stuck a #4 screw in. I think his system was better—it sounds more complicated—but I need to see some skates that have it before I can reproduce it. In any case, what I did worked pretty well.
Skating in them was very hard. The lack of a hollow meant the blades slide all over the place instead of digging in when I push. And the blades are very, very curved. Jones wasn’t kidding about that when he compared them with Dutch skates:
ours would by no means be proper for travelling, because the irons are short and circular; not above two inches of their surface touch the ice at a time; all our attention is required, to keep the body in an equilibrium on so small a base, which would be almost impossible to continue for any length of time
Jones 2017 [1772], 33.
The difference in curvature is clear when comparing a Jones blade with an MK Silver Test blade (rocker radius = 7 ft).
My first couple of times out on them were not promising, but I will persevere.
Reference
R. Jones and W. E. Cormack. 2017. A Treatise on Skating. Edited by B. A. Thurber. Evanston, IL: Skating History Press.
Yesterday I put the finishing touches on my snavelschaatsen. I started them back around the end of February or the beginning of March, so it took me about 9 months to make them, start to finish.
My finished snavelschaatsen.
These skates are based on a couple of Hieronymus Bosch paintings and some archaeological finds. The style is about 500 years old.
Skating on snavelschaatsen in the Hell panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1495–1505). Courtesy of Wikimedia commons.
To make them, I used an assortment of modern hand and power tools at CIADC. The blades are forged from 3/8″ mild steel bar stock and filed flat by hand. I cut the outline of the wooden footstock with a table saw, then moved to a table router, a bandsaw and a belt sander for the larger details. The smallest details were hand-carved with a chisel. I used a drill press for both the holes for straps and the hole to put a screw through the metal part at the heel. There are more strap-holes than any of the paintings or finds show because I want to try out some different strap configurations and hole positions. I finished them with couple of coats of polyurethane on the wood part and a layer of paste wax on the metal blade, except the part that’s going to contact the ice, which I left bare.
The skates in progress, as of June 2, 2021.
The really interesting thing about them is that they are the first skate model that required edge-pushing. With the earliest metal-bladed skates, it wasn’t clear whether skaters were pushing with their feet or sticking to poles, as they did with bone skates. With prikschaatsen (spiked skates), skaters could have pushed with their toes. By this point, it’s clear that skaters were pushing with their feet. The long neck on these skates would have made it impossible to toe-push.
I’ll write more about them once I’ve tried them out. I also need to make the long-toed shoes that were popular back then for the most realistic experience.
Bibliography
Niko Mulder. 2009. “Ten IJse 5—Snavelschaats volgt de mode op de voet.” Kouwe Drukte 13 (37): 32–34.
Hans van der Donck. 2011. “Schaatsen uit een Delftse beerput.” Kouwe Drukte 15 (42): 22–25.
Wim Molenveld and Frits Locher. 2011. “Oude schaatsijzers, bodemvondsten uit Haarlem.” Kouwe Drukte 15 (43): 11–13.
Hans van der Donck, Niko Mulder, and Kurt Cerstiaens. 2012. “Westlands houtje.” Kouwe Drukte 16 (46): 12–13.
Early skating authors had a lot of bad things to say about deep hollows on ice skates.
I have said nothing of those skates whose surfaces are grooved, and are commonly called fluted skates, because I think their construction is so bad, that they are not fit to be used; in fact, they are so generally disapproved of, that I shall dispense with explaining their defects.
…
Ladies’ Skates should be fluted.
Jones [1772], 37, 95
Fluted skates, if at all useful, are only fit for boys, and should not be used by moderately weighty persons, or those who are heavier than boys of thirteen usually are, as the sharp edges cutting too easily into the ice, prevent the possibility of figurings; indeed these skates are even dangerous, for the ice cuttings, collecting, and hardening in the grooves, raise the skater from the edge of his skates, and thereby endanger his balance.
Williams 1843, 113
The feeling of “sharp edges cutting too easily into the ice” is familiar to everyone who has ever had the skates’ radius of hollow suddenly decreased, intentionally or not.
I do not recommend fluted skates, or those with a groove or channel along the bottom of the steel. They certainly take an easier hold of the ice than the ordinary kind, but they can only be worn by light weights, and, in any case, are treacherous servants. The tiny shavings of ice which are cut up by the edge are sure to collect in the groove, where they become impacted into a solid mass which can hardly be cut with a knife. By degrees the groove is filled up, and, lastly, the compressed ice projects beyond the steel, and causes inevitable falls. Many a person has fallen repeatedly without any apparent cause, and has only regained the use of his skates when the groove has been cleared with a strong knife. This habit of the skate is termed ‘balling.’
“On the Ice” 1863, 17
Walsh (1877) gives a good description of how skates were sharpened using a grinding wheel. The grinding wheel does not produce a flat cross-section; instead, the blade’s curvature from edge to edge matches the radius of the grinding wheel:
The Skate-Blade was formerly fluted to prevent supposed lateral slipping, but this fluting is quite unnecessary and is now obsolete, the concavity given to the skate-blade by grinding it on the lap at right angles to the length of the blade being more than sufficient to ensure the cutting edge holding the ice without slipping laterally. The blade of the skate should be no deeper than will ensure a curve being made without the edge of the boot, to which the skate is attached, touching the ice.
Walsh 1877, 726
Today, figure skaters use much deeper hollows. It’s even reasonable to say that all today’s figure skates are fluted, but skaters don’t seem to have problems with ice balling up in their blades. What happened?
References
Robert Jones. 2017 (1772). A Treatise on Skating. Edited by B. A. Thurber. Evanston, IL: Skating History Press.
In his 1772 Treatise on Skating, Robert Jones describes what he considers the ideal skate in detail, including measurements:
Figure 1 (top) represents a skate, made after the English fashion, with some improvements; the proportions are as follows: Let the distance from the point of the fender, A, to the toe hook, which is shewn by the pricked line, be one inch, and three quarters; B, the fort of the iron, whose lower surface is five sixteenths of an inch in breadth, and gradually increases to five eighths of an inch, at the point of the fender; and from B, must gradually decrease to a bare quarter of an inch, at the heel D. C, the arch where the height of the iron is one inch three eighths; at B, one inch one eighth; and at D, one inch and a quarter: the groove that is cut in the stock, to receive the upper edge of the iron, is seldom made more than a quarter of an inch deep, so that the height of the iron from the stock will be at the arch one inch and one eighth, which is high enough for any sort of skating. E, the toe strap hole; F, the under strap hole; each of these holes must be cut so that the straps may go in very tight. G, the heel peg, whose diameter at bottom is a quarter of an inch, and at top one eighth; its height is determined by the heel of the shoe with which it is to be worn, but is seldom less than half an inch. H, the heel screw, which should always be made short. Figure 1 (bottom) is a plan of a skate compleat, with straps, &c. M, the heel of the stock, whose diameter is two inches and three eighths. G, the waist, whose diameter is one inch one eighth. L, the tread, which is two inches and seven eighths in breadth. The thickness of the stock is three quarters of an inch; but the surface of the tread must be depressed a quarter of an inch, that the ball of the foot may rest easy. I. I. I. are little sharp points of iron, each of which projects from the stock about one eighth of an inch; the distance from the centre of the under strap hole, to the extremity of the heel, is two inches and a half; and from the centre of the heel peg, A, to the extremity of the heel, one inch one eighth; K, the under strap; P, the heel strap, N. N. rings to which the straps are sewed; the length of the under strap from ring to ring is five inches and a half, and the heel strap seven inches; the length of the toe strap is determined by the size of the foot, but it must always sit very tight in the stock.
N. B. These proportions are for a middle-sized foot.
Jones 2017 [1772], 34–37
He even includes a diagram:
Robert Jones’ ideal skates. Jones 2017 [1772], 36.
Jones’ detailed description doesn’t answer some rather burning questions, such as “how far toward the front did the skater’s shoe go?”. I also wonder what “improvements” he included and whether skates that incorporated them were ever actually made.
Robert Walker’s left skate (1790s). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
It seems to have a clamp at the heel instead of a screw, and the rear lacing hole seems to be doubled and under the instep—a bit farther forward than Jones put it. It does show that the skater’s toes come all the way to the front of the wooden footbed and highlights one possible lacing pattern, which is shown from a different angle on the other foot.
Sybolt Woudenberg owns a pair of skates that are similar to these. In Kouwe Drukte, they’re compared with Robert Walker’s skates, but from the heel screw and position of the rear hole, they look a bit more like Jones’s. However, they do have an extra hole under the instep, like Walker’s skates. Maybe Jones forgot to include that? And the toes seem to curl up farther without flaring out like Jones’ do.
References
Robert Jones. 2017 (1772). A Treatise on Skating. Edited by B. A. Thurber. Evanston, IL: Skating History Press.
